Light Snacks Will Be Served

On Bangkok.

I wasn't going to put this piece of writing on the blog. It's ponderous and dark. Probably too much so for this medium. But today I read this piece by Pankaj Mishra (my restaurant gets a shout-out, which is nice!) and I thought, what the hell. I'll give you a slice of my Bangkok pie. It's of a different flavor.

The prosaic sort of poem below was colored by two events that happened outside my house. And those things that happen within the confines of the restaurant. Bangkok has a sinister side, but most writers don't get it right. I'm not sure I do either, but this is, I guess, an attempt.

I read this piece at the Bangkok Literary Festival held at the Neilson Hays Library a few months back. The topic of the readings was the city in which I live. And so, here we go...  

 

After the wild-eyed tuk-tuk driver nearly ran me down,

In front of a festering canal beside my house,

He scowled, then spilled out of his machine.

He came at me with an amphetamine tick and a beer-perfumed hiss,

And I wondered what the hell I was doing here.

Then I began to run.

Once, when my best cook disappeared, I wandered to the bank through the back streets of Sukhumvit.

Morlam chirped from cheap speakers, as I made my way to the teller, and I thought about him.

I cared about him.

And looking down at the cracked pavement, trying not to trip, beside the bus stop,

I spotted my chef.

He was sitting on the sidewalk, on a straw mat, a block from the restaurant.

Beside him, an ancient-looking fortune teller, sipping an energy drink, whispered in his ear.

My eyes met the chef’s, and then they didn’t, as if guiltily we shared the same secret.

The chef came back to work the next day.

I had dreamt of a restaurant, and then I had one, and so I stopped writing stories about others and tried to make one about myself, under this backdrop of Bangkok.

And it was through the eyes of others, like the Burmese furniture maker who swam across a river to become a waiter, that I began to understand this place.

And the chef from Yasothorn, with a sharp stutter from a motorbike accident, who pages through catalogs of amulets, looking for one that might bring him something better.

Then there’s the dishwasher whom I once watched kill a rat with his hands. “I wouldn’t dream of cooking,” he said, when I tried to promote him. “There’s just too much noise in my head.”

We are guests, 13 of us, sitting at the same table, waiting for what comes. The one thing we know is that Bangkok does not belong to us.

After a long night at work, we sometimes go to Rama 9 Road, to eat Isaan food and drink beer.

The restaurants there bear the names of places and dishes from upcountry – Larb Phet Sisaket, for instance – which must make customers feel closer, or farther, from home.

The massage parlor girls spill in, with the bartenders and the taxi drivers, and in the fluorescent light, their hard lives seem less so.

And after many drinks we sometimes talk about our dreams, and often, my staff talk of going home.

This Thursday, after midnight, I returned home from work.

And on the same street where I was almost run down, beside the brown canal, there were piles of blood-stained cotton.

Pairs of surgical gloves were ripped inside-out and left to lie beside the empty wrappers of life-saving things, syringes and bandages and the shattered plastic from a broken bike.

I sat and stared at it in dim light from my own motorbike, as it idled, alive.

The next day, as I began to write this piece, I thought about dreams, and how they drift into our lives, changing our perception of a place.

This city we live in invites cliché, as we catalog the strange sensory experiences here that come to define Bangkok.

But they don’t, really. They’re just smells and sounds and sights that we cling to, for safety, on our way home.

They’re our handlebars. 

 

On Top 50 Lists, Crowd-sourced Reviews, and What Makes a Restaurant Great

When Restaurant Magazine releases something like its World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, sponsored by that avatar of good taste, San Pellegrino sparkling water, people are bound to talk. Outrage, backslapping and head-scratching ensue. And that’s precisely the point.

People take this shit seriously. NOMA is the best restaurant in the world. For three years running! Seriously, what could be better than that? (For me, the answer is, a place that’s open after 11pm in my neighborhood serving pretty decent sushi where I can eat after service. One that serves cold beer, and remembers what kind of fish I like to eat.)

I was considering this list last week. Much as anyone else who writes about, eats at, cooks in, or owns these sorts of restaurants probably was. And so we’re clear: I occasionally eat at and write about these sorts of restaurants. I don’t cook in or run one.

Forget about who came in at one, or ten, or, to my great delight #50 (nahm, in Bangkok). It’s not a representative list by any measure. Asia barely gets a nod, as Lawrence Osborne cleverly writes about here. Japan is largely (and bafflingly) tossed by the wayside, as are Hong Kong and mainland China, Singapore and Bangkok, KL and Seoul and Saigon.

But does that mean that Asia deserves half, or even a quarter of this list? I’m not so sure.

As anyone who evaluates restaurants on their relative merit knows, it’s about more than what arrives on your plate. Is there ice in your drink? Is there even a drink menu (or ice)? Is the drink menu sticky? Or the table for that matter? Are there napkins?  Is the flatware clean? Are they playing Celine Dion on the flat-screen? Is there air-conditioning? Is the kitchen a filthier, open-air extension of the dining room? Are your waiter’s fingernails dirty? Is there a toilet? Is there an old man sleeping on a cot wearing a diaper in the back?

These are experiential things to consider. And there are a few dozen more. And Europe, America and Japan mostly do those front-of-house things much better.

Conversely there are many, many westerners who romanticize the allure of eating on the street. There are some who’ve made writing careers out of it, insisting that Asia’s finest food is cooked out-of-doors. That’s all fine and good, and the dish or two that one might serve on the corner could be unspeakably, RM-SP World’s 50 Best delicious, but that doesn’t make it a great restaurant. It makes it a street food shop serving a great dish. To be truly great, your pony needs to perform a few more tricks than putting good food on a pink plastic plate.

The RM-SP list is a recent phenomenon. An even more recent, and I would argue more influential one are crowd-sourced review sites on the internet. And here is where I think more people really, really get it wrong.

Consider this:

Nahm, which I mention came in at number 50 on the RM-SP list, and which I firmly believe is the finest Thai restaurant in the world, barely cracks the top 75 on tripadvisor.com, IN BANGKOK ALONE. This, from what seems to me the most influential restaurant site for independent, English-speaking travelers in Asia. (Meanwhile an Indian snack joint sits snugly at #2. Have a look, and draw your own conclusions).

Crowd-sourced reviews can be useful, venomous, venal. Sometimes all at once. After nearly two years in the business I can assure you that customers who have bad experiences are far more likely to convey them to their imagined readership than those who enjoy good ones.

“I read about you on tripadvisor” seems more of a threat than a greeting sometimes. Like arriving at your table dressed in chain mail.

The internet is populated with a lot of food reviewers who take their unpaid profession rather seriously. There is nothing wrong with this, but what is flawed is their lack of accountability, experience, or accuracy

(Should I really take the time to respond to Jaquilp, and tell her that in fact we don’t serve Mekong whiskey in any of our cocktails, let alone all of them? Or that there is no order to the food that arrives, unless you ask for it? Is Metacritic798 really just a disgruntled owner from up the street? Should I bother to explain to PapabearandPanda that Soul Food isn’t in a “weird neighborhood”? Probably not. But I know I'm not the only one considering their words.)

It’s far too easy for dishonest owners to fluff their numbers, and price seems to be the first consideration for many online reviewers. (Fair enough, but is value a measure of greatness? I don’t really think so.)

Which brings me back to the beginning...

Lists are infuriating. Lists are tantalizing. Lists are fucking lists.

But ice-cold Sapporo, some fatty slices of hamachi, and a smile, at 1145pm… That shit is for real.

 

Wintersummer

(Because it's Christmas, and because it's not-quite-hot outside today, I thought I'd share this little snippet of life in Bangkok that I wrote for my friend Christine's Summerzine project earlier this year. Happy holidays, wherever you are...)

Wintersummer

In Bangkok, we celebrate this fleeting hint of winter.

It is our summer.

But it is shorter than your summer. Sometimes it never even comes. When it does, we know it will soon be gone. And there is sadness in the almost cool air, like there is on the last day of vacation.

Our summer comes around Christmastime, except that it’s not Christmastime, unless you’re a tourist here on your Christmas vacation, or you're shopping. The city’s many shopping malls do play Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer and fake snowflakes are strung from their ceilings. There might be a sale on bathing suits or flip-flops or plastic trees. And this reminds us that our summer is about to come.

Outside, in the thick and sticky air, beer companies erect monuments to themselves in front of the shopping malls to remind us it’s summertime. We come by the thousands to drink watery beer from toy-like plastic towers emblazoned with logos of lions, tigers, leopards and elephants. Some of us wear wool hats while we drink, as if the beer might give us a head cold. The centers of those toy-like beer towers are filled with ice to keep the watery beer cold in the middle of our not-quite-sweltering wintersummer. This is the only time one might wish to sit outside on the baked concrete plain that is Bangkok. And so we drink to forget.

And the surest sign that it is summer in Bangkok is when our street dogs, who roam freely in our alleyways and block the jigsaw sidewalks as they sleep through the afternoons, put on their tee-shirts. The dogs might get cold if they didn’t, but in wintersummer they usually do. It’s like the plum blossoms in Japan, announcing the arrival of spring. But weirder. Funnier.

So if you ever find yourself in Bangkok, in the middle of winter, and you see drunks in wool hats wandering around shopping malls festooned with the roaring logos of jungle cats and surrounded by sleeping street dogs dressed in colorful tee-shirts, smile.

It’s summertime.   

Stuck inside of Bangkok, with the Paris blues, again.

So the story goes like this: 

You don't go on a lot of vacations when you work in the food business. Since I hung up the writing spurs and did this thing, I left exactly once for a four day trip to China for a (beautiful) wedding. There was a pipe-dream escape to Spain in May that never happened, for several reasons. And it all began to build up, the frustration and the heat and wet of Bangkok and the hours and the fact that I haven't left Asia in two years. And then I had a dream. My wife and I were eating oysters in some unknown Parisian brasserie, out on the sidewalk, and it was all so perfect in my intangible, dreamy belief, until I woke up and opened my eyes and saw the heavy rain falling on the palm trees outside.

I booked tickets that morning.

"Fuck it, you gotta go sometime," I thought. "And now you don't have a choice."

And so we went. And it was sublime.

And there were oysters.

(More to come on what we ate and where, and also a bit about my new little project at Soul Food Mahanakorn)

 

Plying With Fire

A few weeks ago a husband and wife team, who were writing a story about new Bangkok restaurants, were asking me questions. They were on the other side of the bar, sipping martinis, which I've found is a very agreeable way for journalists and I to conduct interviews. I stood there and tried to say something clever, while watching the drink tickets come in.

Then I got an order and lost my train of thought, just as they asked me “what is your favorite ingredient in Thai cooking?"  

Prawns? Lemongrass? Mint? Roasted sticky rice powder? Lime leaves? Fried shallots? Or maybe something more elemental, say, fish sauce or palm sugar or coconut cream? I don’t know. There are so many.

Then I started to mix the drink. Cucumber, smash. Passionfruit, just a bit. Gin, lots. Lime, ice, shake, pour. Where's the ginger ale? Shit. Seriously, where is the goddamn ginger ale? Is it down there, under the sink? There it is, behind the ice bucket. Top it, slice of cucumber, stir, wipe glass, table eight.

And I'm back. 

"Now what were we talking about?"

"Your favorite ingredient."

"Oh, right."

I looked at what the two were eating. Duck larb -- a clamorous salad that resonates with sour and spicy and smoky notes – smoky, because we add smoked duck breast to the mixture. They were also eating ribs, which I slow-braise in a sort of tamarind barbecue sauce with lemongrass and chili and finish on the grill, for another taste of smoke. And stir-fried flowers with egg, which I have my wok cook blast with heat at the beginning so that my cast iron woks breathe their smoky heat into the food.

And I had one of those empty-headed revelations that you get when you’re doing four things at once. “Smoke. I like to play around with smoke. Yeah. That’s my favorite ingredient.”

A country meal of beef and two jiim jeow dips, cooked in Nong Khai, Isaan.

Thing is, it’s true. I’ve seen smoke disappear, in its myriad forms, as kitchens modernize across Asia. Smoke is drifting away from Chinese cooking, as home cooks stir-fry over low-heat ranges, in non-stick woks. Many mainland restaurants would rather drown vegetables in peanut oil and garlic than try to execute a proper, smoky stir-fry (it’s easier to do so).

I remember the first time I tasted a stir-fry of mushrooms, in a grimy Chengdu alleyway at dusk, from a wok that was so hot it glowed. It was cold and damp outside and I wondered if the cook could poke his metal spatula right through the wok (I know now that you can’t). There was chili, and soup spoons of salt and msg, and soy and oil and cornstarch maybe even a dusting of spring onions in those mushrooms. But it was the smoke, which sprung out of a pressed disk of coal underneath and heated that wok a shade of tangerine, like a cow-brand, that made the mushrooms sing.

Smoke is disappearing from street food, as more cooks flash-fry meats in little saucepots over gas rings, rather than slow-grilling the way they should and always have. Smoke is disappearing from Thai food as more people eat in sterile mall food courts in between shopping for tee-shirts and outfits for their dogs to wear. Meatballs and sausages are cooked over middling electric coils, as fat collects in little detachable plastic trays. 

A charcoal grill is not difficult to install in a restaurant kitchen in unregulated Bangkok, but fewer restaurants do. Charcoal is dirty and it is tedious and it is absolutely essential if you are going to serve Northeastern Thai food.

Smoke is disappearing from the ripping-hot red dried chilies that people used to roast in their woks and grind in their kroks (that’s a mortar and pestle), but now buy pre-packaged in the super or wet market. These flat, lifeless chili flakes are not allowed in my kitchen. (It is also not hard to roast your own chilies. Cough.) It is disappearing, too, from northern curry pastes and nahm prik pao, where shallots and garlic and other things should be grilled and smashed into heady pastes. 

Pounding roasted chilies into powdered form, for cooking.

Sometimes, when I spy a guest nervously start to rock back and forth in their chair, as they wait for their chicken wings or their steak nahm tok or a fish grilled in a leaf to arrive, I smile inside. Because two floors up my grill man Pi Bun is carefully cooking their food over the slow, low coals that people from Lao and Isaan have cooked over for centuries. Pi Bun knows about smoke.  

He knows that it takes some time. But when the food arrives, suffused with the perfume of mangrove charcoal, it’s worth it.

It’s the best ingredient I’ve got.   

 

The Customer is Occasionally Wrong

I’ve been waiting to write this post for a long time. It is not intended to nip at the heels of diners, or to generate sympathy, or even to encourage other restaurateurs to stand up to their clients. It might make some people angry, or indignant, but my intent is not to provoke.

I’ll begin by saying this: I really like people. All kinds. I’m comfortable on the floor, talking to strangers. I enjoy spending time with my customers, and over the past year many patrons have become friends. Without them, my restaurant is a sad, empty husk.

But let’s consider an altruism  altrustic aphorism that is rammed down our throats from the first time most of us take a job in the service industry: The Customer is Always Right.

Ah, the limitless possibilities of infallibility.

I used to preach this very line to my staff, and I danced around the subject once here, in the story of the lady in pink who only ate pink things. While it’s best to bend over (backwards, mind you) for customers in most situations, there are times when one is asked to bend a stretch too far. There are some customers that are, in fact, wrong. I assume they know this, because entering a place that serves food does not exempt one from societal norms. I’ll give you a few examples:

If you throw a birthday party for 23, order water and a few salads, and sneak in 3 bottles of rotgut rum in your pants to drink under the table with your friends that is wrong. You know it is. And you should expect to be thrown out when we catch you, but we won’t. Because we are masochists.

I bet he doesn't play the violin

If you do not eat any animal products, and you waltz into a restaurant and dourly demand a meal without any animal products, when the cuisine cooked in that restaurant’s kitchen is built on a foundation of seasoning that comes from animals, this is not right. It’s like going into a guitar shop and demanding that they sell you a flute. Really, I have nothing against vegans. But my restaurant does not sell what you seek. And it is not your right to demand for us to do so. (Still, we probably will, and especially if you call ahead, because we are masochists).

If you storm into a restaurant to demand a table, at 830pm on a Friday night, with two escorts in tow and a rented luxury car parked in plain sight outside, thinking that this will aid your chances of getting a table without a reservation, it won’t. And if you force the owner to ‘call your butler’ at your 5-star hotel while he is busy serving perfectly nice people their dinners, well, that is not right. If you then throw coins in anger at my staff, and spit on the floor, and threaten to burn down the building, well, that really isn’t right either. And you can fuck off, because we’re not that masochistic.

Right now, as you read this, you might think – oh, this is just bitterness. Venting. Catharsis. Whinging. Well, perhaps, but I’m trying to get somewhere. I’m trying to make a point.

The Customer is Always Right is Occasionally Wrong. It encourages people to act in bizarre and uncouth ways. Ways that they would never behave in someone’s home, or grocery store, or library. 

What the wrong customer does is affect the dining experience of respectful guests in a negative manner. Whether it’s backing up the kitchen with a ridiculous order; shouting and cursing in midst of dinner; berating staff so that they’re afraid to do their job; or taking up all the tables so that they can surreptitiously sip booze that they snuck in, in their pants. It fucks up a machine we spend a lot of time tuning. It gives bad people an unfair advantage – they get all the attention while perfectly civil people are ignored. And that is selfish.

Last Friday I had probably the weirdest night in terms of service since we opened at Soul Food. But the thing was, after all the problems had subsided, I looked up at the bar and in the dining room and felt a surge of contentment. Like a glance of warm sun in winter. A regular offered to buy me a beer. People smiled and chatted as they ate their meals. My staff breathed a little easier, and things returned to normal.

And as I hop and skip from one cliché to the next, I’ll admit it. This is why we do it – for that feeling of satisfaction we get when others are happy for what we do. It's a relationship.

And this relationship of trust and respect is what's right about customers, and about us, the guys on the other side.

 

Do The Tighten Up

We've had to close for a few days to fix a plumbing problem that I expected to have to fix. Old Bangkok shophouse plumbing takes some ingenuity to sort out. But that's a good thing, because it gives myself and my kitchen team time to think and get all of our systems in place. 

Yesterday we cooked all the dishes that will be on our limited opening menu. We made the final measurements, weighing each portion, costing it out, plating it, photographing it, eating it. We'll do the same thing today (well, the cooking and eating parts anyway) and tomorrow while the space is repaired. Afterwards, I took my crew to a local bar and we drank a few bottles of whisky and talked, and the mood was calm and relaxed. We feel like family now.

I don't want to trod on kitchen cliches, but after two months of working with these people, 7 days a week, I really have an attachment to them that I've never felt in other work situations. They put it all out there. They get frustrated by me and I am occasionally dissatisfied with them but no matter what Bun and Eck and Ken and Nym are there, waiting for me in the Klong Toey market, or smiling at the grill when I arrive at 10am. They wai (bow) politely each night at 1am when they're dragging out the garbage, and do it all again the next day. I have so much respect for their work ethic, their trust in me, and their belief in the promise of our little restaurant. Those four people make me incredibly proud. 

On that note, here's a few things we've been working on:

Burmese-style Gaeng Hang Lay (Pork belly curry w' dried spices), organic white jasmine rice.

 

One-bite chicken wings fried with lemongrass and lime leaves, Sriracha sauce, pickled ginger. 

Nahm prik two ways: Roasted green chili salsa and sweet pork and tomato salsa served with quail eggs, pork rinds, okra and baby eggplant.

Beef Short-rib Khao Soi (curried noodles) with lime, chili, shallot and pickled mustard. Off to work. 

Long and Sometimes Promising Times

 

Anyone who has opened a restaurant or bar knows how long those first days are. People who haven't do too. But it doesn't really hit you until you're in the midst of it, cooking and plating and shaking drinks and checking orders and getting feedback and dealing with staff coming and leaving and quitting and paying and paying more and praying that someday it'll all pay itself back. That's where I'm at now. I need to sleep, but here are a picture of the food from tonight, on our fifth or sixth test run, and a glimpse of the menu. It's coming along.

 

(we're not ready yet, but we're getting there...)

Dad and I...

At the expense of tiring you out with restaurant stories, I'm going to post this piece I wrote for The Atlantic Food Channel yesterday.  It's a personal piece about myself and my father. I'm so grateful for his help, and we really had a great time working together. Enjoy.

The ragtag Thai construction crew sat on the plastic cooler that holds their ice cubes, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. They were staring at the old man carefully fastening pieces of wood on the wall. Slowly, deliberately, he would measure a length of teak, saw it, and place it against the one that went before it. Then he would fit the piece, gently tapping it into place with a hammer. A level would appear out of his pocket, as he checked that the wood was straight.

The workers stared as the strips of wood stayed straight and true for twelve feet, and they smiled coyly as the old man whittled the final piece of wood with a knife. His determination baffled them. But after an hour of whittling and sawing the wood fit perfectly in a corner where a concrete pillar rose from floor to ceiling. That pillar was crooked by nearly two inches, and the old man grunted and cursed before he forced the final piece into place. “That wall runs like a goddamned snake,” he said, when he was finished. The crew didn’t understand his English, but they understood his frustration, and they laughed.

The old man is my dad, Jim Wrisley. He’s 63 now, and the last time we worked together I was fourteen years old. That summer, he caught me smoking behind a dump truck that I was driving on his construction site. He fired me on the spot, and for the rest of my adolescent life I scooped ice cream, waited tables, and worked in kitchens. My father and I didn’t like working with each other very much, back then.

He’s since sold his construction company and settled into his idea of semi-retirement (which means renovating houses, buying apartments, and installing kitchens for friends). Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to get my first business started here in Thailand.

And the obstacles were significant. The designers I chose to create my space deceived me, running off with my money in what I now understand is a simple but fairly clever scam. When I refused to use their grossly overpriced contractor, whose bid was double my budget, they refused to do any more work on my space, even though they were under contract. I later deduced that my designers – a pair of artists from Thailand and Japan – can’t actually design restaurants.

They use their cachet to find work, which they then pass on to a friend who has a building and design firm. When I refused to use their contractor I lost their direction and interest, but they kept my money. Rent was pouring out, work wasn’t progressing, and I had to completely redesign my restaurant in a matter of weeks. The prints they gave me were mostly unusable. So I picked up the phone and called my father.

My dad doesn’t accept many mistakes, and he’s a curmudgeon when he works. He speaks in parables, about jobs worth doing well and stitches in time and bees and vinegar and honey. He also fixes and builds beautiful things with enthusiasm and great care. “Son, this is a shit show,” he said, 12,000 miles away on the other end of the line. “I’m coming over.”

And so for three weeks I worked with him, building wood walls in my bar and restaurant, as he oversaw the final stages of the construction and worked closely with my Thai contractor. It was a well-managed mess at best – Southeast Asian construction is far from scientific – but my father grew close to the staff that helped him work. In between jobs, I planned a trip to Phnom Penh, because I needed to go there for business reasons. When we returned a day later, we both didn’t feel well.

As my dad’s fever climbed that night and the color drained from his face, I grew scared. He suddenly seemed fragile. We still had work to do, I had a full crew to manage, and I had to deliver pots of chicken soup to Bangkok’s Sukhamvit Hospital (rice porridge is not suitable sick food for a Pennsylvanian). For three days he slept there attached to an IV, with a bad case of food poisoning, and I shuttled back and forth from jobsite to hospital.

I got to spend an extra week with my father because of that unfortunate salad, and in the end everything worked out with perfect timing. On Dad’s final night in Thailand, the space was nearly finished, and my cooks toiled in the kitchen. The bartender stood behind the bar, shaking cocktails. The music was turned on for the first time. We listened to old soul music as light reflected off the wood walls he had built, and drank whiskey sours. The shop was filled with a warm glow, and when we sat down and ate our first meal in the restaurant, it felt surreal.

“This is the hardest I’ve worked in twenty years,” he said after dinner, chewing on his cigar with a smile.

“But it was worth it, son, and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”

 

 

Merit Making

  August 30, 10.30am, Soul Food Mahanakorn